Editorial: 15 December 2011

December 13, 2011 A selection of Caitríona Ní Chléirchín's Irish-language poems from her debut collection Crithloinnir are published here with translations into English by the poet. The imagery of these finely wrought pieces often draws on nature: the excitement of being with a lover is “a branch-like flame/ through an oat field”, and love is also described as  “A wild bee, a bumbling humming bee/ forever inside me,/ never showing any mercy”. The ballad-like ‘Dernahshallog’ luxuriates in a mythic lover’s paradise reminiscent of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, a “fragrant wood” replete with autumnal delights – acorns, moss, holly berries, nuts, apples, deer, thrushes and blackbirds. In poems such as this, Ní Chléirchín, as Liam Carson notes in his introduction, unashamedly creates “a self-enclosed world, a secret world” of lyric passion.

Greg Delanty’s depictions of love in his wry, witty poems are more down to earth. ‘The Chemistry’, for instance, a three-part poem with a jaunty couplet rhyme scheme, charts the progression of a couple from the “powerhouse of urges” on an early date, through the slump and disappointment as the initial sparks fade, to the oxytocin of the “slow-burning relationship/ soldering them together”. Katie Donovan also considers the biochemistry of love: in ‘Rootling’, the title poem of her latest collection, “the tears of labour/ and lolling hormones” make the narrator “gush”, despite the fact that there is “nothing romantic/ in th[e] vital ritual” of breastfeeding. Indeed, Donovan does not romanticise the love between a parent and child: as she portrays it in this poem and elsewhere, it is a bodily, struggling force, a tussle between two bodies: “I suffer him to bite and and smite/ the nipple that feeds him,/  I give him my finger to gnaw/ like a puppy worrying a shoe,” she writes in ‘The Boy’.

Tough love continues in Michael O’Loughlin’s ‘A Latvian Poet Encounters Ròisìn Dubh’ with its striking, visceral imagery: “You lodged beneath my skin/ like a sliver of glass. Good pain/ when I pressed, it made me feel alive.” The title of this poem references the famous political song in which Ireland is personified as a woman; in ‘An Irish Requiem’ O’Loughlin also considers a relationship to his country via that of a human relationship with a relative who, “born in another country, under a different flag”, knew a very different Ireland to him: “As governments rose and fell, she never doubted/ The name of the land she stood on.” In an introduction to the poet, Patrick Cotter notes O’Loughlin’s feeling of alienation towards the Irish language and nationalist identity as a child, though he later found admiration for the language through poetic encounters with it. ‘On Hearing Michael Hartnett Read His Poetry in Irish’ describes such an encounter, in which the narrator’s associations of the language with a nation’s history, “the music of what has happened”, give way to aesthetic pleasures:

– But tonight, for the first time,

I heard the sound
Of the snow falling through moonlight
Onto the empty fields.

And with that image, we wish all our readers a peaceful and festive end to the year. We will be back in January 2012 with poetry from Australia and Burma, as well as a special issue later in the month to celebrate National Poetry Day in the Netherlands and Flanders.